In the Face of Moral Dilemmas, How Right Can Our Decisions be?
A scribble of (not fully well thought-out) reflection after an intensive 5-hour moral philosophy class, 500 rewatches of The Good Place, and 9 hours of listening to Mike Schur’s audiobook: “How to be Perfect”.
When facing a situation where we have to decide on a viable course of actions among bad options, the choices largely come down to how we feel about the number’s game, the intangible aspects of our options, and the intensity level of our altruistic virtues. And if we try to take it all into our consideration all at once, it’s almost guaranteed that we would be rendered paralyzed.
In most cases, doing something with a good moral intention is always (somewhat) better than being a bystander and doing nothing. As a part of the society we’re living in, we have the moral obligation to contribute to the good of one another. We are also entitled to feel a limited obligation to our own society, our peer group, or else we are prone to get paralyzed in our decision making process, believing that we have to do the absolute correct thing that benefits everyone. The reality is that life is a game of winning and losing, and if we’re lucky, a tie — but the chance of this being the case is very low.
It’s almost inevitable that we will definitely fuck something up in the process and as a result of our decision making, especially those involving moral dilemmas.
It’s a matter of making the least bad decision among the options of bad decision. The degree of badness of a decision is not always dependent on the obvious numbers as an act utilitarian might argue. The weight of the intangibles should also be taken into consideration. How big of an impact does the person affected contribute to the society by simply existing? What are their potentials in the future, even if it is uncertain? Sometimes we have to make the bet. What are the intention of our action? How does it affect those directly around us? Does it create more harm than good, and for whom?
If we surrender to the number’s game, any individual who happens to find themselves in a numerically disadvantaged presence will have no chance of ever winning. If we play the number’s game and scribble it on the stone as the one rule that we must follow obediently, any person — innocent or not — as long as they’re in the minority group of people, will always be sacrificed. There will be no challenging the status quo, there will be no considering more than what meets the eye.
And to my fellow altruists, this is not to say that we should always be the knight in shining armor, trying to insulate everyone who are in a less fortunate condition than us from the harm that is a part of the overall human experience.
For someone who upholds an altruistic virtue, sacrificing themselves always tend to be easier than to inflict harm on someone else. However, we must not forget about our obligation to sustain ourselves due to our obligation as a part of an institution — any institution: family, friend group, what have you. Sure we feel like we have the moral obligation to self-sacrifice to some degree, but we also have the moral obligation to take care of ourselves for the sake of retaining the peace of mind of those who care about us.
While doing something seems to be a better thing to do than to be a bystander, and the idea of saving as many people as possible is more important than saving ourselves, there’s a certain degree of limitations to how much or how little we owe each other.
The determination to always obtain the highest level of goodness through our course of action can result in us being paralyzed in our decision making process, which in turn makes us do nothing at all, and nobody wins. This is the kind of tie we want to avoid. Sometimes it’s better for someone to lose than for everyone to lose. It kind of helps to think that our obligation should be faithful primarily to those who are directly affected by our actions. Doing something that creates even just a tiny ripple of goodness is more valuable than letting the stillness drown those who are clearly in need of help — that is within our capacity to help.
Since there is a big chance that our action will benefit a group of people and harm another (hopefully the minimal number of people with the minimal degree of harm), sometimes all we have to do is to accept it as the reality of life, live with the consequences, and keep trying to do the right thing as we move on with our life.
